Science for Sale by David L. Lewis, PhD

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Science for Sale: How the U.S. Government Uses Powerful Corporations and Leading Universities to Support Government Policies, Silence Top Scientists, Jeopardize Our Health, and Protect Corporate Profits
by David L. Lewis, PhD
Skyhorse Publishing

Science for Sale offers a good peek at what really goes on in modern science. If you’re not aware of the agendas, money, and political influence, then you don’t really know what is going on. Dr. Lewis has experienced firsthand the allegations of dishonest reporters and science journals. His experience is detailed in this book. He gives examples that illustrate how any branch of science the government is involved in becomes corrupt. He is a former EPA scientist, so he knows whereof he speaks. In those circles they play hardball.

In a discussion with Newt Gingrich about a controversial article Lewis had just published, Mr. Gingrich said, “You know you’re going to be fired for this, don’t you?” Dr. Lewis was well aware of that and just hoped to stay out of jail.

Dr. Lewis was very involved with trying to get the EPA to do its job correctly in protecting the environment and public health from toxic biosolids. He attempted to coerce the EPA to stop publishing falsified data. This got on the nerves of EPA upper management, and that is why he is now a former EPA scientist.

It turns out that Lewis knows a lot about the case of another well-known scientist who has been dragged through the mud—Dr. Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield greatly upset the pharmaceutical industry when he published a study suggesting a link between MMR vaccines and autism. Among his attackers were writers who were published in the British Medical Journal. For those who believe the prestigious BMJ and other scientific journals can do no wrong, they neglected to mention a financial conflict of interest in this case. It was probably a little after this book was published that Dr. William Thompson, senior scientist at the CDC, revealed that while employed at the CDC he and other CDC scientists and top officials hid data showing that black males are 340 percent more likely to be diagnosed with autism when they received the MMR before age three. So there is substantial evidence that Dr. Wakefield was right and the BMJ and CDC were wrong, and they knew it.

Lewis makes the comment that the two worlds of science and religion can never merge. In the next sentence he says that, at least to some extent, they need to merge. I agree. I think we are getting close to if not right at the core of the problem when we look at the mindset in the first sentence, which says science and religion are fundamentally incompatible. They belong to two different worlds. That eloquently illustrates our fractured view of reality. Does some basic truth change every time you change the subject? I find that idea bizarre. If that is happening, then our understanding of one or both subjects is wrong. The modern, segmented view that separates reality into thousands of disconnected, unrelated subjects leads to all kinds of problems. We end up with experts who know everything about nothing, who can’t believe cancer or other disease in one part of the body could be due to a root canal in another part of the body. They may not explicitly admit it but in practice truth, integrity and value for life─being under the category of religion─are considered irrelevant in science. That is how we end up with GMOs. That is how we end up with vaccines and drugs that are worse than useless. That is how we end up with factory farms. Science without ethics or morality is not just worthless, it is dangerous.

A very interesting and disturbing comment from Caroline Snyder, professor emeritus at the Rochester Institute of Technology, is included in the book. She was one of millions of German citizens who fled Germany at the end of World War II. She noted that many Nazi scientists were very involved in the atrocities committed during those times. As far as she could tell, not one of them ever protested or joined the resistance. When many of them were brought into the United States after the war, they quickly assumed high positions as government or corporate scientists, and their brand of ethically bankrupt science seems to have spread throughout the American scientific community.

A growing number of books expose the dark side of establishment science. Many of them are written by insiders with firsthand knowledge. Books like this make it very possible for anyone to learn more about what’s really going on. The thumb is UP.

 

This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Winter 2014

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